{"action":"created","issue":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1","repository_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox","labels_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1/labels{/name}","comments_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1/comments","events_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1/events","html_url":"https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1","id":235648355,"number":1,"title":"The future of the Ruby Toolbox","user":{"login":"colszowka","id":13972,"avatar_url":"https://avatars2.githubusercontent.com/u/13972?v=3","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka","html_url":"https://github.com/colszowka","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/colszowka/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"labels":[],"state":"open","locked":false,"assignee":null,"assignees":[],"milestone":null,"comments":38,"created_at":"2017-06-13T18:32:24Z","updated_at":"2017-06-16T06:02:48Z","closed_at":null,"body":"Hello everyone,\r\n\r\nas you might have heard, last week the server hosting the Ruby Toolbox crashed. While it's definetely possible to re-build from backups, I would like to use this opportunity to set in motion a discussion about the future of the site.\r\n\r\nLaunched in 2009, the Toolbox has always been a closed-source site. There's a bunch of reasons for that, but the most notable one was that I did not want to take on the burden of having to manage an open source community around it, having seen how much of a time-sink maintaining SimpleCov has been for a long time. This view has changed over the past few years as a bunch of smart and handsome people joined the simplecov team as contributors. I also believe the general attitude of open source users has shifted, caused by a whole bunch of \"open-source-burnout\" blog posts to a more positive, and encouraging community, replacing a wide-spread feeling of entitlement to free support.\r\n\r\nIn 2014, my wonderful son Noah was born and as surely many parents can confirm, it becomes somewhat harder to hack away into the night, so even though I've had plans to open source the Toolbox for years, I never managed to get this going.\r\n\r\nOver the years, I also got contacted by literally dozens of people asking to help, but since I never reached a baseline, published open source repository we could have built upon together, I never could really give a pointer where to start.\r\n\r\n### Why not simply open source the current version?\r\n\r\n* The codebase is quite outdated since I didn't put much time into it beyond bare neccessities in recent years\r\n* The app has for years also been my personal playground for trying out things, so generally it's just not in a shape that I consider good enough, neither for publishing with confidence nor as a good foundation for future development\r\n* With the re-launch in 2011 I had added a whole lot of \"community\"-features like submitting resources about projects, comments, and more, most of which take up a huge portion of the current code yet I personally do not see these as part of a future Ruby Toolbox\r\n* It also featured a way for the community to submit changes to projects using a Pull-Request-inspired mechanism. This was fully built into the app but as me as the only reviewer, also suffered from the same bottlenecks.\r\n\r\n### Why is it so hard to build a new open source version?\r\n\r\nIt's definetely not hard to build a fresh version of the Ruby Toolbox, from a technical standpoint. \r\n\r\nMore than anything though, every time I attempted to build a new version of the Toolbox, I stumbled into \"philosophical\" issues. Is this even needed? Who would use this nowadays?\r\n\r\n### What should the Ruby Toolbox be?\r\n\r\nSince I started the Toolbox in 2009, the Ruby ecosystem has changed, and stabilized, a lot. For many use cases, the community has settled on a specific solution. I would really like to hear what you all would like too see from the Ruby Toolbox. I won't go into much detail on my ideas in that regard here in order to not give too much direction into this discussion.\r\n\r\n### Sustainability\r\n\r\nI've experimented a bit with adding ads to the Toolbox in early years, but the 100 - 200 USD per month were in my opionion ultimately not worth polluting the site with banner ads. For a few years now, the site has had a Paypal donation button, which currently generates ~25 USD per month from 3 recurring donors and one-off donations between 0 and 15 USD per month. I've been taking care of paying the hosting, which has been around 60 EUR per month. \r\n\r\nI take great pride of providing a resource that has proven very useful to fellow developers all over the world, but it also is sometimes down-putting to, beyond time for development and maintenance, also add money to keep the site going.\r\n\r\nAfter the outage, plenty of people suggested to create a more formalized donation scheme, for example with Patreon. Would people be interested in this? Ultimately, if we get enough donors I even could put in some proper work time in place of my usual freelance consulting gigs. I also wonder whether companies would be interested in joining in on this? Again, I'd love to hear your thoughts!\r\n\r\n**I'm looking forward to your feedback, and thanks a lot for the many kind words of encouragement and support that reached me over the past week! Let's get this started!**\r\n\r\n"},"comment":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/comments/308940974","html_url":"https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1#issuecomment-308940974","issue_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1","id":308940974,"user":{"login":"phrozen77","id":1218594,"avatar_url":"https://avatars0.githubusercontent.com/u/1218594?v=3","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77","html_url":"https://github.com/phrozen77","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/phrozen77/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"created_at":"2017-06-16T06:02:48Z","updated_at":"2017-06-16T06:02:48Z","body":"Keep the site up, please :)\r\n\r\nWhile i'm not a Ruby dev for long (if i can even call myself one at this point ;) ), in my previous attempts at becoming one, The Ruby Toolbox was a great resource to find what i need, gem-wise...\r\n\r\nI'll keep an eye on this and will help in whichever way possible :)"}}
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